BJ Bueno
Biography
As a gifted speaker and branding expert, BOLIVAR J. BUENO has had the privilege of presenting his ideas on consumer psychology for organizations including CNN, Target, IBM, Kohl's, and the LA Lakers.
As a speaker and board member of the National Retail Federation (NRF) and the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association (RAMA), BJ advises companies like Target, Walmart, Washington Mutual, Toys-R-Us and Kohl's in their retail, advertising, and marketing efforts.
A dynamic thought leader in branding and marketing, BJ has been interviewed by CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, and CNN en Espanol. BJ has built a reputation for his insight and expertise into building brands. In 2006, BJ founded The Cult Branding Company as the premiere brand loyalty research consultancy, serving major retailers and other national and international brands including Kohl's Department Stores, Scheels, CAT, Turner Classic Movies, LA Lakers, and The Life is good Company.
BJ is the author of Customers First: Dominate Your Market by Winning Them Over Where It Counts the Most (McGraw-Hill, 2012) and is the co-author of The Power of Cult Branding (Crown Business, 2002), a work that received rave reviews from leading mavens like Jack Trout, Al Ries, Jay Conrad Levinson, and Jeffrey Fox. He is also the author of the handbook Cult Branding Workbook as well as Why We Talk: The Truth Behind Word-of-Mouth.
BJ was born to a missionary family in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and he grew up in places like Bolivia and Peru. How does a nine-year-old boy pass the time camped in the high peaks of Peru? "Read books and learn magic," BJ reveals. While others his age were playing baseball and going to school, he was mastering the secrets of the world's greatest magicians and pouring over the work of brilliant minds like Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Joseph Campbell.
BJ's passion and love for the art of illusion was evident to anyone who saw him perform, and by 17, his exploration of the mysteries of the unknown led him into marketing and advertising. As a perpetual student of the mind, he began exploring new ways of blending the fields of humanistic psychology, comparative mythology, history, religion, and psychiatry into his masterful discipline of consumer marketing and advertising.
By age 23, BJ had delivered keynote speeches to the Harvard Business School, Fortune 500 companies, and top universities throughout the world. In his lectures, BJ explains that successful marketing is comprised of what we know about life: If it matters, it will sell; if it tastes good, let the customer taste it.
The heart of his message is simple: NO MATTER WHAT BUSINESS YOU ARE IN, WHETHER YOU HELP FARMERS TILL THE SOIL OR MAKE DREAMS COME TRUE ON STAGE, THERE MUST BE A PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE TO YOUR WORK. BJ says, "What do I know? I know people want to feel free so they dance. They hit the road all weekend long trying to live ... not forget. I know people want to put on their Spock ears and leave this planet. They told me so. The experience of feeling alive, that's what they want. That's what I know."
BJ Bueno
Featured Keynote Programs
How to Get Your Customers to Choose You First
Over 90% of customer behavior is unconscious. Understanding the unconscious psychological motivations of customer behavior is the crucial key to achieving greater market share, improved organizational efficiency, and increased profits. Delving into the nuances of human nature makes it possible to predict, with a high degree of certainty, how customers will react to new products, marketing initiatives, and more. This results in significant organizational efficiency, boosting a company’s visibility and market share, and enhancing overall profitability. The ability to predict consumer behavior is what differentiates dominant organizations from the rest of their industry.
Using his company’s proprietary research methods and insights into consumer psychology, BJ illuminates the strategic competitive advantage that comes from a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s best customers.
The Seven Golden Rules of Cult Branding
Cult Brands aren’t just companies with products or services to sell. To many of their followers, they are a living, breathing surrogate family filled with like-minded individuals. They are a support group that just happens to sell products and services. Picture a Cult Brand in this context, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why brands like Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Southwest Airlines all have such high customer loyalty and devoted followers.
In exploring the foundation from which all Cult Brands are built, BJ decodes the unseen mechanisms that facilitate brand development, the Seven Golden Rules of Cult Branding, and how to break free from the conventions that hold most brands hostage.
The Psychology of the Customer
Successful brands embrace their customers by anticipating basic and spiritual human needs. Using leading edge cognitive research, humanistic psychology, comparative mythology, and common sense, BJ dispels traditional marketing philosophy and gets to the heart of what matters most for your business: your customers. When you understand your customers—their behaviors, dreams, needs and quirks—you can bridge your products and services to your customers’ hearts and minds, paving a path to brand loyalty.
With insights into the human psyche that transcend conventional beliefs about marketing and advertising, in this engaging talk you’ll learn how to deeply connect with the hearts of your customers.
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouth
As business owners and professional marketers we’ve cast the mold on innovative ways to amplify and cultivate Word-of-Mouth (WOM) advertising among consumers. So why then have our most brilliant marketing strategies failed to produce a winning formula that consistently increases WOM? Why has today’s “connected” consumer become virtually mute to many of our messages? Could it be that while we’ve tried so hard to affect what people talk about to each other, we’ve overlooked the biological and psychological reasons why they talk in the first place? Have we failed to identify the core need people try to satisfy when they talk?
In this engaging talk, BJ reveals startling truths about the dynamics of human communication that will change the way you look at how you market to your customers. Connecting all the dots to fully understand mankind’s need for the spoken word, you’ll learn how to utilize this knowledge in marketing, advertising and selling your product and services through the world’s most powerful medium: people.